This year’s exhibition takes place under the theme of Art & Environment = CROSSING. A multinational network of artistic practice and discussion on art and environment. 50 artists from 5 countries – Belgium, France, Israel, Korea and Mongolia – take part in exhibitions to present their work discourse in four of Gwangju’s cultural and artistic sites.

Alexandra Dementieva is the curator for the Belgian section. She states:

We live in troubled times. While the 21st century opened the era of high-tech inventions, increasingly implemented in our daily lives making it comfortable and pleasant, the consequences of this development are climate change, the destruction of forest systems, water pollution, extermination of other living species and social changes. Society is increasingly divided between the extremely rich and very poor.

Our era is called Anthropocene coining the moment when human beings became the main driver of changes in the environment. If anthropocentrism were concerned with the good of both present and future generations, it wouldn’t have condoned the global spread of the frivolous excessive exploitation of limited resources which are turned into merchandise.

Art Platform On ‘Art & Environment = Crossing’ creates an opportunity to open up debates on the international level on these pressing topics, to bring into discussions hidden or carefully avoided issues by cutting-edge industries and the leading world elite.

It is a big mistake to think that this murderous tendency can not be resisted. Every person with a small contribution can undermine it, but that means everyone has to be aware of it and realize the power of their contribution to the process. Art and education must henceforth be favoured as the main factors of this movement.

Artists, with their ability to create visual representations can awaken and inspire the worldwide community to get involved in a process of improving life by thinking how to save the earth’s ecology, stop the war for natural resources and show alternative ways of developing our civilization on Earth.

It is certainly not an easy task and we have to create and maintain cooperation among all of us, overcoming all borders, to spread constructive and positive thoughts all over the world.

Belgian artists:

Beatrijs Albers & Reggy Timmermans

Yvonne De Grazia

Alexandra Dementieva

Various Artists

Koen Wastyn

Chonnam National University Museum, Miro Centre, Lee Lee Nam Studio, Thinking Box Gallery

8 – 16 November 2022

Featured images by Alexandra Dementieva

FERMENT is an arts and ecology festival which explores fermentation in its broadest sense — of both fermenting food and also ideas — and offers an exciting range of activities with food and art as mediums for creative engagement.

Organized by artist, curator and founder of CYLAND MediaArtLab Anna Frants and exhibition coordinator at CYLAND Lydia Griaznova, Ferment is de second iteration of CYFEST-14 which took place in Dartington Estate, UK for the first time last year.

Fermentation as a natural process might be an entry point in seeking new approaches to perceive the world and to devise alternative attitudes of how to live here differently. To be able to respect life as it is and share the world with others seems to be an essential feature and an ongoing training process in an ever-changing world. Sometimes a radical step will not be another leap in progress made in a blink of the eye, but will take place extremely slowly, with a long-standing accumulation of energy. Where there was once a sharply-focused vision with a well-planned horizon of the future, there will be a wide-angle observation of ways to exist “other than me” — planetary, existentially, organically.

We are inevitably part of the world of many forms and ways of lives, despite how individual and separated our own life might feel sometimes. How could we be conscious and responsible actors in this process? Art might not provide straightforward and exact answers, but it may offer some clues about the directions where these answers could be located.

Alexandra Dementieva will present Sleeper (2015–2017), an interactive sound installation with tapestry and AR. A series of tapestries forms an installation that presents a sequence of film frames from the movie “Sleeper” by Woody Allen. The movie has been glitched and accidentally “edited” by the artist’s crashed computer, becoming completely transformed and practically unrecognizable. The order of narrative development has been rigorously preserved: the still images are arranged in the same sequence as they appear in the film. The tapestries convey the movie’s plot, but in their own way, where some parts have been lost and others have remained. The size of each tapestry is 58×77 cm, which corresponds to the television and film format (4×3) of the 20th century. The artist uses an old visual technique: the art of weaving. Even if contemporary digital media were destroyed, this technique would be preserved.   

By pointing a tablet with an AR application at a tapestry, visitors can watch a video which gives an explanation for each tapestry. The video is made from the perspective of human descendants / space travelers, who have found the tapestries 2000 years later. Their conclusion is that the tapestry is a way to archive film and video from the 20th-21st centuries. The film they find is Sleeper, a science fiction movie about a dystopian world.

Other artists presented in Ferment are Alexander Bochkov, Anna Frants, Alexey Grachev, Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov, Pavel Ignatev, Ivan Karpov, Katran, Sergey Komarov, Antti Kukkonen and Alena Tereshko.

Ferment starts this Friday 23 September and runs until 1 October at

Dartington Esate
Totnes, Devon,

TQ9 6EL, UK

More info, full program and images can be found here.